Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus was an American photographer whose stark, square-format black-and-white portraits of marginal and outwardly unconventional subjects made her one of the most-influential American photographers of the twentieth century. She was born Diane Nemerov on March 14, 1923, in New York City, to David and Gertrude Nemerov, owners of the Russek's Fifth Avenue department store, and grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in Manhattan.

She married the actor and photographer Allan Arbus in 1941, when she was 18, and through the late 1940s and 1950s the couple ran a successful commercial fashion-photography studio that shot for Vogue, Glamour, and Harper's Bazaar. She left the partnership in 1956 to pursue her own work and studied with the Austrian-American photographer Lisette Model, who encouraged her toward the direct, frontal portraiture that became her signature.

Through the 1960s she photographed transvestites, circus performers, nudists, twins, triplets, and people with dwarfism and giantism, often in their homes, on assignment for Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, and The New York Times Magazine. The Museum of Modern Art's 1967 group exhibition New Documents, curated by John Szarkowski and pairing her with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, brought her work to a wide audience and helped redefine American documentary photography.

She died by suicide in her Westbeth apartment in Greenwich Village on July 26, 1971, at age 48. The 1972 Aperture monograph Diane Arbus, edited by her daughter Doon and the photographer Marvin Israel, has remained continuously in print and is among the best-selling photography books ever published. She was the first American photographer given a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, also in 1972.

Her name Diane is the French form of the Latin Diana, the Roman goddess of the moon, hunting, and childbirth, ultimately from an Indo-European root meaning "divine" or "heavenly." Diane was one of the most-popular American girls' names of the 1930s through 1950s and was given to her at birth in 1923 during the rise of that mid-century vogue.